During the 2021-22 fall-winter menswear season, Virgil Abloh (1980 – 2021) conceived a scenography that almost completely reproduced the interior of the Mies Van der Rohe pavilion (also known as the Barcelona pavilion). Cold and authoritative, this green marble environment became a pretext for the artists to question our modernist heritage and contemporary relationships to it.

The title of the exhibition, Modernistin, is the first reflec- tion of this interrogation. This German term for "modernist" has here been feminised. This transformation is an invita- tion to revisit our era based on the two-fold observation that while the "modern" era is over, it continues to fascinate artists and designers.

A series of photographs by Niklas Taleb punctuates the exhibition. Without ever truly giving access to the couple’s private life, the photos taken in the artists’ living room in Essen, Germany, only invite the gaze through their windows. The hood of a car, the balconies across the way, and a parked truck are reminiscent of banal urban decor, but the framing and color choices trouble our habitual relationship to images.

Phung-Tien Phan presents three series of sculptures: a laminated grid separates three different spaces in the exhibition. Lamps, the incarnation of the standardised object, reference domestic space as much as workspace.
A children’s play kitchen recalls, in its cubic form, coworking spaces and the kitchens of contemporary apartments, small islands where we share pod coffees or store-bought food.

Adjoining Phan’s sculptures are a series of photos from Taleb’s place of work, where he took one of his colleagues as subject. They pose at their desk, in front of their compu- ter. These moments seem to be failed images: with the photographed subject closing their eyes or awkwardly holding their phone.

The two artists look sideways, to the edges of the unexpected. Taleb’s photographs only reveal details, the images appearing almost independently of the photo- grapher. Phan’s sculptures are the assemblage of standar- dised objects that sometimes barely seem modified, simply posed, put on pause. The displacement of objective and the play of scale are enough to provoke a displacement of the gaze, and thus of thought.

Modernistin is the first phase of Les Furtifs residency for Taleb and Phan (June-July 2022). In an extension of the exhibition, they will create a new series of artworks inspired by Capc’s offices and their residency apartment, extending their work on the permeability of spaces. Modernistin is also the occasion for Taleb and Phan to produce an artwork in collaboration with Alexander Schöpfel.

Curator: Marion Vasseur Raluy